adult play-date: the new statesman back pages

I used to write for the New Statesman’s “back of the book” relatively frequently. Which was something that I impressed myself by doing – for god’s sake, I had a paper subscription to the thing before I moved to the UK. But editors change, and then, well, the salad days at £275 or whatever per pop are over.

But can someone tell me what the hell is up with the “back pages” columnists? Just picked up this week’s number on the entry-way floor, strummed through it while waiting for my daughters to call so that I can order my Friday-sabbath Pakistani feast (this is satiric performativity by the way – bread and butter tactic of this crowd) and this is what we have:

– Will Self at a bloody Who concert. “many of us share at least some of Tommy’s disabilities – although, unlike the deaf, blind and dumb kid, we’re no longer capable of playing a mean pinball.” Suppose it’s a slight uptick from “Man with a giant thesaurus visits the Stockwell Burger King to, well, verbalise about it.”

– Suzanne Moore telling us about a fling she had with a maybe-IRA bro in the, what, 1980s. She had sex with a guy who took her to a Holloway Road pub. All of her columns, from what I can tell, are about sex in the 1980s with a guy who she met in a North London pub. But this one seems to have used a false name, which is I guess more interesting. Would make a great anecdote, in a North London back garden like mine, over BBQ. But everyone would walk away, as do readers of Moore’s columns, simply thinking, “Hmmm… seems like she needs us to know that she once had a load of bad sex.”

– Tracey Thorn lamenting the fact that her teenage daughter is free and easy enough to borrow the family tent, go to Latitude (wow), and get up to whatever dirtied her “micro shorts.” Good Christ. You should know though that while watching Glasto on the BBC, her highlights were “Mary J Blige and Jessie Ware, and the moment when Pharrell brings some children up on the stage.” She also “gear[ed] herself up for Kanye West.”

– I’ll never make fun of Nick Lezard because 1) he’s literally the only bit of the New Statesman that I read in my lovely hand-delivered copy each week. 2) I’ve gone though a nasty bit of divorce-with-kids like him. 3) Above all, he writes really well. But still: I feel, as opposed to the above, that I’m cringing with him, rather than at him, as he details his weekly struggles with the Marylebone mice, the rising prices of wine at Majestic, the (oh dear) “hefty loan from the daughter.” Mostly the column seems like a worst case “divorced man of letters with kids” plea for help – I suppose the help comes mostly (though this weeks column is about a reader who sent him £50) in the form of cheques from the New Statesman.

At any rate, that’s this week’s back bits. And one can easily (if one wants) imagine the four at a sort of mixed North London, well, if not a dinner party, perhaps one the “better pubs,” where one could play out (as if with our youthful “action figures”) the conversations between the bunch. Does Lezard call Thorn up on the fact that he owns not a tent, let alone the scratch to fund his daughter’s Latitude indulgence? Do Moore and Self query each others hazy (but scriptable, when need be) sense of the 1980s and 1990s?

But the bigger question is: Why does the New Statesman, ostensibly the “soft left” magazine of Britain, feel the need to regale us with the stories of people who were born at a point when they could a) go to university for free b) louche around a bit, even quite a long bit and then c) still find themselves a house in North (or South) London and a healthy sinecure at a paying magazine? Why does it feel the need to stage some sort of horrific Islington adult play-date in its own back pages?